NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY AND FIRAQ GORAKHPURI

                                          

NIETZSCHE'S  PHILOSOPHY AND  FIRAQ GORAKHPURI

"Maut ka bhi ilaaj ho shaayad

Zindagi ka koyi ilaaj nahin."..Firaq Gorakhpuri 

(Perhaps there may be a cure even for death,  

There is no cure for life.) 

Firaq Gorakhpuri’s line, “Maut ka bhi ilaaj ho shaayad, Zindagi ka koyi ilaaj nahin”, expresses an idea that fits closely with Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his ideas of "amor fati", loving one’s fate, and eternal recurrence, the thought of living the same life again and again. By saying death might be cured but life cannot, Firaq points to the same problem Nietzsche saw after the “death of God”: once old religious answers disappear, we are left with life as a condition that has no outside fix or escape. In Nietzsche’s terms, this is the messy, painful, but real side of existence that cannot be tidied up or solved with rules. Firaq’s mood is sorrowful, accepting that life has no remedy. Nietzsche would agree with that truth but push it further, arguing that because life cannot be cured, we must say “yes” to it anyway and give it meaning ourselves, even if we had to live it over forever. So through Nietzsche, Firaq’s couplet is not simply despair, but a clear starting point: once we see life has no cure, the real work of creating values and strength begins.

( Avtar Mota )

PS

(1) Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Ghalib, and Firaq Gorakhpuri are the three towering figures of Urdu poetry because each defined a different age of the ghazal. Mir, known as Khuda-e-Sukhan, gave Urdu its classical soul in the 18th century through verses of unmatched emotional purity, capturing grief and longing with austere beauty. Ghalib reshaped the form in the 19th century, bringing philosophical depth, irony, and metaphysical questioning that turned personal pain into universal thought. Firaq carried the tradition into the 20th century, blending Ghalib’s intellectual complexity with Mir’s lyricism while adding a modern humanism that addressed love, nature, and the existential burden of life itself. Together they represent Urdu poetry’s complete arc , heart, mind, and modern voice ; which is why all three stand at the apex of the canon.

(2) In Nietzsche’s phrase “ Death of God or God is dead,” he meant that the  Christian worldview which once gave Europe its morality and purpose had in his opinion  collapsed under modern science and reason. This left a void of meaning, leading to nihilism, but also the challenge for humans to create their own values and affirm life without relying on divine authority.

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POET. FIRAQ AND NATURE OF SELF (ATMAN)

                                     

FIRAQ  AND NATURE OF SELF (ATMAN) 

"Kah diya tune jo masoom tau masoom hain hum,

Kah diya tune gunehgaar , gunehgaar hain hum" ...( Firaq Gorakhpuri)

(If you pronounce  ‘You  are the Unstained’, then unstained I stand;  

If you declare ‘you are the Transgressor’, then transgressor I become.)

Read through the Upanishads , Firaq’s couplet moves beyond the lover’s lament and turns into a doctrine of the Self (Atman). The ‘you’ addressed here is no longer the earthly beloved. It is the Absolute, whose Will (Saṅkalpa)utters the world into being, projecting the paired opposites of Virtue (Puṇya)and Sin (Paapa) upon the formless (Brahman).

What the poet discovers is that innocence and guilt are only limiting adjuncts ( Upaadhis ) or masks draped over the Self (Atman), which by nature is Without-Qualities (Nirguṇa) and Immutable (Nirvikaara). No label can cling to it. This is why the Bṛhadaraṇyaka Upanishad repeats "not this, not this" ("neti, neti"): every designation falls away, leaving only the witness.

The beloved’s speech, then, acts as the Power of Illusion (Maaya-shakti). It spins out 'Name and Form ' ( Naamroopa ) , the world of moral binaries, while the substratum stays true to the great Upanishadic axiom: "One only, without a second" ("Ekam eva advityam").

So the verse is not a confession of dependence. It is the Individual-Soul (Jiva) awakening to "That Thou Art" ("Tat tvam asi"). Whatever thou namest me, that I am ; because in truth, there is no ‘I’ distinct from 'Thy' Word.

(Avtar Mota)

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FIRAQ GORAKHPURI'S COUPLET AND VIRAAT-SWROOP OF SRI -KRISHNA

                                     

Firaq’s couplet, seen through Arjuna’s eyes at Kurukshetra

“Koyi meri aankh se dekhta

teri bazm-e-naaz ki wusatein,  

Woh har ek gosha makaan makaan

woh har ek lamha zaman zaman”....(.From .....Gul-e-Naghma of Firaq Gorakhpuri)

(If only someone could see through my eyes the vastness of your assembly of splendour,  

Then every corner would be a universe entire, and every moment an age unto itself.)

Fluent in English , Hindi Urdu, Persian and Sanskrit, Firaq incorporated elements from his deep, self-taught knowledge of the Persian texts, Vedic and Puranic ethos into his poetry. His  belief in religion was never narrow or sectarian. His focus was always on  human beings : "Devtaon ka Khuda se hoga kaam/Aadmi ko aadmi darkar hai" or "Shaikh ji ban gaye farishte-sifat/Aadamiyat se haath dho baithe".

Firaq  enriched and indigenised his Urdu assimilating many words and characters from Hindi, Sanskrit and Braj Baasha literature. Words and names  like  Shiv, Ram, Sita,Nal, Damyanti , Komal, Kaaran,  Deepshikha, Agnikund, vish, Ang, Pawan, Mukh, Kumadini, Kanwal, Vanvaas, Roop, Shringaar, Dukh, Sansaar,Amrit, Suhaagan,  and many more  in his  poems, Gazals and Rubais. Firaq had a great fascination for English literature. Who else except firaq could translate Homer, Virgil, Wordsworth, Hardy and Wallace Stevens into beautiful Urdu ?

Firaq once remarked that the verse quoted above pertained to human beings, yet observed that it might be more keenly understood by considering Arjuna’s predicament, once Sri Krishna revealed his Viratswaroop before him. Firaq went on to suggest that Arjuna must have said to Sri Krishna, “If only one could borrow my sight to comprehend the sheer expanse of your court of majesty.” That, precisely, is Arjuna’s plight. Granted the 'divya chakshu', he gazes into Sri Krishna’s Vishwaroopam and the battlefield simply dissolves. What stands before him is no longer a charioteer, but a cosmic -bazm : thousands of faces, arms, and suns blazing forth from a single form. Every gosha, every fold of that terrible beauty, unfurls as 'makaan makaan', whole universes nested within a corner, gods and sages wheeling inside his very teeth. Space itself forfeits its meaning. The part now engulfs the whole.

And time fares no better. 'Har ek lamha zaman zaman' , each instant becomes an epoch. Bhishma, Drona, Karna: all are already streaming into those fiery mouths like moths to oblivion, though the war has scarcely commenced. Past, present and future are crushed into one shuddering moment. Arjuna’s mind reels. This is 'hairat' weaponised, wonder so vast it curdles into terror. He pleads for the human form once more, for the finite. Firaq wrote of love; Kurukshetra reveals it as metaphysics. When the Beloved discloses Himself entire, every glance contains galaxies, every breath contains ages , and the lover, mortal, can only bow and break.

(Avtar Mota)

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CHAOS AT CDG AIRPORT PARIS

                                            

TICKETING / EES SYSTEM  FAILURE AT CDG AIRPORT PARIS YESTERDAY ( 26th June, 2026)

For catching a flight to the US, we  had to  stand continuously for more than 3  hours , trapped outside the security  check-up gate at CDG, Paris. We were told to stay put as the computerised  system had collapsed ,  and it felt like we wouldn’t make it out. No water.  No fans. No way back. Paris was in the grip of a heatwave and inside CDG it was worse,  thousands  packed with no fresh air and  no space to move. We’d already emptied our bottles outside  the security check- up gate , and now we were choking with thirst.A Sri Lankan employee at the CDG was moved and arranged 250 ml water for us. That was a great favour ; certainly unforgettable. I told my wife in Kashmiri that we would die without water like it happened at Karbala. An Iraqi co- traveller behind us caught that one word, "Karbala"  and cried “Water! Water!” .Somehow  some 250ml tetra packs appeared in a box carried by an Airport employee. People pounced upon this box. The kind Iraqi co- traveller  pushed two into our hands.  That was great.  Arguments erupted. Crowds surged. A Turkish traveller urged us  to clap in protest. And after  hours of hell, we were released to a stampede. We  walked CDG’s endless corridors to arrive at the gate number printed on our boarding passes  only to be told that the gate had changed to 12 from 32 . Exhausted, we walked again. The last  relief came from a Gujarati employee at the United Airlines  on duty at gate 12 who saw us and enquired if we needed water or fruit juice. He  brought us to a sofa and made us sit  comfortably as the flight was delayed . By now we had also bought juices, water and some croissants . We were overwhelmed  by the humanitarian acts of the  Iraqi co- traveller, the Sri Lankan employee at CDG , and the  Gujrati employee at United Airlines   . May no  traveller see such scenes anymore  .

( Avtar Mota )

PS

It appears that the airport terminals of CDG ,Paris   ( Terminal 1 at least ) are  not designed for traveller comfort.Too much up and down through lifts,  escalators.  tunnels and moving  paths  . Inadequate free drinking water. Airport terminal may be architectural novelty but there is lesser  functional efficiency.

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WHILE HEATWAVE SWEEPS FRANCE, RELUCTANCE TO INSTALL AIR-CONDITIONER CONTINUES

                                         

( An employee  setting  right AC of the restaurant in France ) 

                       ( Old building without ACs)

Why Air Conditioning Still Meets Resistance in France

For most of the 20th century, France had little use for it. Summers were mild, heatwaves were brief, and buildings were engineered to hold warmth, not shed it. The cultural response became instinctive: lower the shutters, close the curtains, turn on a fan, and wait it out. Air conditioning arrived as something foreign , a heavy-handed, American answer to a seasonal inconvenience. That instinct has settled into five enduring reasons:

1. Environmental concern

AC draws significant power and expels heat into the street. In a country that takes pride in low-carbon electricity and ecological awareness, widespread air conditioning can feel like a contradiction , private comfort at public cost.

2. Deep-rooted health worries

 

La climatisation is widely blamed for colds, stiff necks, sore throats and general malaise. The evidence is thin, but the belief runs deep. Cold, dry air is culturally coded as unhealthy, even aggressive.

3. Noise and the look of the city

Portable units drone. Fixed compressors blemish Haussmann façades and spark disputes within the copropriété. In a culture that treats visual harmony and quiet as civic values, AC is an intrusion.

4. Buildings that fight it 

Thick stone walls, wooden shutters, listed facades, awkward windows. The Parisian apartment was built for winter. Installing AC means cutting into protected architecture, and the permissions process is formidable.

5. The ethic of restraint

There is a quiet suspicion of comfort that comes too easily. To endure the heat is seen as stoic, measured, responsible. To fit AC can feel like a concession , a choice of convenience over character. “We manage without it” remains a point of pride.

The context, however, is changing. Heatwaves are longer, stronger, and more frequent. The same buildings that once preserved winter heat now trap summer temperatures to dangerous levels. For infants, older residents, and those under the roof, “managing without” is shifting from virtue to risk. The real question is no longer whether to use AC, but how  keeping a room at 26°C rather than 19°C, using it judiciously instead of reflexively. 

The French resistance to air conditioning is rooted in history, architecture, and a particular sense of measure. But when summers hit 40°C, culture meets physics. And physics does not negotiate.

( Avtar Mota )

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ANALYSING A COUPLET OF POET FIRAQ GORAKHPURI

                                         

ANALYSING A COUPLET OF POET FIRAQ GORAKHPURI

"Shiv ka Vishpaan tau suna hoga,

Me bhi aey dost pee gaya aansoo.."

(You have heard of Shiva drinking poison,  

I too, my friend, swallowed my tears.)

The couplet stages a deliberate movement from the mythic to the mundane, from cosmology to phenomenology. In Puranic theology, Shiva’s Vishpaan during the Samudra Manthan is a paradigmatic act of Lokasangraha: the voluntary assumption of toxicity to preserve cosmic order. It is public, transfiguring, and teleologically resolved. Firaq re-inscribes this archetype within the register of lived, quotidian experience. The  Vish becomes Aansoo. The site of ingestion shifts from the divine throat to the human interior. This is a philosophical demotion of scale but an elevation of ethical significance. The couplet posits that private endurance constitutes its own mode of theodicy, one that lacks a witnessing public or a redemptive narrative.

Ethics of Unspectacular Sacrifice

Within the Indic ethical tradition, Tyaga is often hierarchised: the King’s renunciation differs from the ascetic’s, the martyr’s from the householder’s. Firaq collapses this hierarchy. By juxtaposing Shiva’s cosmic act with the swallowing of tears, he articulates what might be termed a democratised metaphysics of suffering. The interlocutor ,"aey dost"  is forced into a moral comparison: the veneration accorded to mythic sacrifice versus the invisibility granted to personal grief. The couplet thus functions as an ethical critique of cultural memory. Societies canonise the spectacular and overlook the interstitial suffering that sustains them. In this sense, Firaq anticipates later critiques of “history from below” and the feminist revaluation of affective labour.

 Aesthetics of Understatement and the Urdu Tahzeeb

The verb  'pee gaya' is casual, almost resigned. There is no  pride in the act, only a factual reportage. This understatement is philosophically significant. It refuses the Nietzschean ressentiment that converts suffering into grievance, and also refuses the Stoic demand that suffering be transcended. Instead, it records a third position: suffering is metabolised, held within the body, and not converted into social or spiritual capital. This is a uniquely modern subjectivity, where the self becomes the sole witness to its own pain.

Intertextuality and Civilisational Dialogue

The couplet  gains further depth when read against the Kashmiri context . The Vishpaan of 1990 was not consumed by political actors but by ordinary sufferers who “pee gaye aansoo” in order to save their lives and honour , educate their children, and maintain cultural continuity . Firaq, though not Kashmiri, provides a poetic grammar for that historical condition. Philosophically, this aligns with Simone Weil’s notion of  Malheur,  affliction that is impersonal and destructive of the self, and with Kashmiri Shaiva ideas of  Swatantrya, wherein the divine freely contracts itself into limitation. The subject of the couplet enacts that contraction: he becomes a Neelkantha without devotees.

Epistemology of the Unspeakable

Finally, the couplet interrogates what can be known and transmitted. “Shiv ka Vishpaan tau suna hoga” acknowledges  the story as Shruti (what is heard and circulated) . “Me bhi… pee gaya aansoo” points to what remains  Ashruti (unheard, un-archived) . The poem thus marks the boundary between cultural memory and experiential oblivion. Philosophically, it poses a question of justice: can a civilisation be called just if its moral accounting recognises only legible, spectacular sacrifice?

In sum, Firaq’s  couplet is not merely lyrical. It is a compressed treatise on the ethics of memory, the politics of recognition, and the metaphysics of ordinary endurance.  Firaq’s couplet shifts the site of the sacred from public institutions to private endurance, locating holiness not in  structures of faith or rituals but in the tears a person silently swallows. In doing so, it confronts a historiography that equates audibility with importance, arguing that official records of noise, speeches, events, and headlines, will always overlook the substance of a civilisation. That substance lies in unspectacular acts of survival that leave no archive: the grief absorbed in solitude, the duties performed without witness, the culture sustained without recognition.

( Avtar Mota )

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IN KASHMIR, ONLY SUFFERERS NEED TO TALK FIRST

                                              

     ( At Srinagar Airport, a Hindu lady police officer is being blessed by a Muslim lady leaving for performance of Hajj .Recent Photo in Social Media ) 

CONVERSATION THROUGH COMMON VOCABULARY

 

The historical resilience of Kashmir's pluralistic ethos was sustained not by political institutions, but by an indigenous spiritual counterculture. While shortsighted political actors repeatedly instrumentalised religious and regional identities to consolidate power, fracturing communities along lines of faith, ethnicity, and ideology, the social fabric endured through the quiet yet transformative work of saints, faqirs, and spiritual adepts. Their teachings dissolved rigid boundaries between the 'self' and the 'other', cultivating an ethic of coexistence that transcended sectarian affiliation.

Shrines functioned as non-sectarian civic spaces where disputes were settled, alms distributed, and devotional music resonated across communal divides. Itinerant faqirs, bound by vows of renunciation, moved effortlessly between Hindu and Muslim households, embodying a lived detachment from political loyalties and worldly power. This syncretic infrastructure gave rise to what scholars have described as a "shared sacred geography": shrines, proverbs, Shrukhs, and Vakhs collectively inherited, revered, and sustained across communities.

The insurgency and terrorism of the 1990s, however, inflicted a civilisational wound. Death and destruction, the indiscriminate killing of innocents, the selective targeting of minorities, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, and the weaponisation of religious narratives precipitated an epistemic rupture of unprecedented magnitude. The centuries-old warp and weft of Kashmir's social fabric were violently torn apart, displacing not only people but also the everyday practices of coexistence that had long rendered political divisionism socially inconsequential. What was ruptured was not merely demography, but memory; not merely neighbourhoods, but an entire moral universe of shared meanings, practices, and belonging.

Peace cannot survive in the absence of dialogue, conversation, and a common vocabulary through which estranged communities may once again encounter one another, not as adversaries defined by inherited grievances, but as co-heirs to a civilisational legacy that neither violence nor politics can afford to extinguish. To begin with, away from political actors, opportunists, non-sufferers and those who benefitted from this human tragedy; let only sufferers on both sides speak to each other first.

(Avtar Mota)

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